Increasingly, foreign language textbooks have espoused a pragmatic approach to the teaching of language, underscoring the value of communicative competence, functional language use, and conversational effectiveness, while at the same time retaining to some degree the more traditional goals of structural analysis and "knowledge about" language and culture(s). However, the notion of discourse competence, defined here as the ability to understand and produce connected, coherent speech in conversation, has remained relatively neglected by materials writers. The purpose of this paper is to determine to what extent grammatical and rhetorical discourse phenomena are addressed in recent French textbooks that espouse communicative or proficiency approaches. In a small-scale survey of eight widely used elementary and intermediate French textbooks, claims and assumptions about discourse that are reflected in grammar explanation, oral exercises, and samples of text are analyzed. (Author/VWL)